← New Books Network
New Books Network
Brian D. Behnken, "Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025" (UNC Press, 2025)
00:59:39
Loading summary
Transcript55 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael Stauch, and today I'm here with Brian Behnken to talk about his new book, Brown and Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement and Civil Rights in the Southwest from 1935 to 2025, which is out now from the University of North Carolina Press. Brian Behinken is a professor of history at Iowa State University. He specializes in African American and Mexican American history, with an emphasis on civil rights activism and comparative race relations. He has published widely within these fields and has also expanded his research focus to explore racial violence, law enforcement, popular culture, and nationalism as they relate to African American and Latino, Latina, Latinx peoples. Brian, welcome to the show.
- [01:51]
C
Thank you so much for having me, Michael. I really appreciate it.
- [01:54]
B
I'd like to begin by asking you how you came to write this book. So could you talk a little bit about what was the journey that brought you to write a book about the experience with law enforcement of Mexican Americans in the Southwest over a nearly 100 year period?
- [02:08]
C
Yeah, that's a great question. Always a good question to start with. So I was doing dissertation research, really began that in like 2005, and it was a totally different project. It was a project on a comparative history of the African American and Mexican American civil rights Movements in Texas. And part of that research was done at the Dallas Public Library. The archivist there, coworks, she was a really wonderful person. She just brought, like I said, I'm doing civil rights. And she just brought out like tons and tons of stuff. And some of the stuff that she brought out were these like full page newspaper, like actual newspapers, like original documents from the Chicano press in the 70s. And the papers in particular were focusing in on this really awful instance of police murder where this Dallas police officer named Daryl Kane executed a 12 year old boy named Santos Rodriguez. And he did that. The police thought that Santos and his brother had participated in a robbery. They were trying to extract a confession out of Santos by using a game of Russian roulette. And on the second pull the trigger, Kane shot Santos Rodriguez in the head in the front seat of the patrol car. And these newspapers told that story, but they had like full front page picture of this 12 year old Mexican American boy still sitting in the front of the police car in the passenger seat, you know, gaping hole in his head, blood all over the place, clearly dead. And I, I find myself getting emotional just retelling that story. You know, I remember it being. It was a summer in Texas, it was incredibly hot and I'm in this library that's cool and just like having chills and, and weeping for this, this child that I never knew. You know, he was basically killed a few months after I was born. And there was something about the story to me that was just so compelling in its egregiousness and its awfulness. And then throughout the rest of my dissertation research, I kept finding these other cases, really famous case in Texas of a guy named Jose Joe Campos Torres, who was similarly killed by the police. Not necessarily a similar set of circumstances, but killed by the police in a similarly egregious kind of way. And the more of these stories that I found, and the more I found this connection to law enforcement and civil rights, the more I thought there's something here. And what ended up happening is I started, once I published that dissertation research as a book, I started doing research in the civil rights era on Mexican Americans and policing. And the thing that happened, Michael, is I would find a case in Arizona, let's say that somehow connected to that case in one of those cases in Texas. And then I'd be looking at that case in Arizona and find a case that was back in the 1950s, and then I'd find a case, I'd sort of follow that lead back in the 1950s and then find a case in California from the 40s and then find a case in Arizona in the 30s. And before I knew it I was researching back in the 1830s. And that's why ultimately this project became pretty darn big. And ultimately I published two books out of it. The first is called Borders of Violence and Justice. Mexicans, Mexican Americans and Law Enforcement in the southwest. It goes 1835 to 1935. Brown and Blue picks up that story from 1935 to today, basically.
- [05:50]
B
Right, right. Well, I think you've done really important historical tasks by entering the names of those folks that were subject to this police violence into the record through the book. And I think that that was one of the more powerful experiences reading the book is coming across these names and all these different people that add up to the story that you tell. I think that that's really, really important and amazing. I'm going to return to the archive in a couple of minutes here, but I wanted to continue, just to kind of continue setting the stage for people who are new to the book or are curious about the book by talking a bit about the title. So again, the book is called Brown and Blue and it covers Mexican Americans law enfor civil rights in the Southwest from this period with this almost 100 year period that you just described. So I wanted to ask a little bit more for you to explain the title. Frequently, usually when we're historians we're including lots of different arguments in those titles. So how does, what arguments are you making with that title and how is it related to the existing literature on policing and incarceration that you're kind of describing?
- [06:56]
C
Yeah, I've, I've always been so I've in titles I've always been a drawn to alliterations and I've always been drawn to the sort of three point subtitle, you know, the blah, blah and blah, you know, and you know. And that's in some ways what you see with the title. I think so. So the brown and blue part is really trying to get at, you know, relation. It's a relational title. It could be brown versus it could be brown or brown and. Or you know, that sort of thing. But what I was trying to show is that sometimes with. And with brown eye, obviously Mexican origin people, Brown and brownness as an idea, you know, sort of comes to the fore in the 60s as a, you know, sort of new ethno racial identity for Mexican origin people. But trying to a say brown is Mexican origin people, but also brown is Mexican origin people who are in law Enforcement, Right. So there's literally Brown and Blue. It's brown in the sense of Mexican American people who are experiencing violence at the hands of law enforcement. It's brown in the sense of Mexican American people who are civil rights activists challenging law enforcement. It's also blue in the sense that, like this is a book about policing, not all the. Not all. And about the criminal justice system, not all the characters are. Are bad. Right? So there are good police officers trying to do good work. And so their story is in there too. It is the case that unfortunately, there's a whole lot of violence to get through. And so part of that relational history is one of the Mexican American community's experience of police violence and brutality and harassment and murder and also the ways in which they deal with it. So that's kind of. That's kind of the big reason for Brown and Blue. The broader argument of the book really fits, follows like Borders of Violence and justice basically started with. Basically started with the idea that Mexican origin people were treated by law enforcement as a colonized people and sort of controlled and dominated by police in the same way that a military would in a. In another colonial setting. And in fact, in fact, the first law enforcement bodies, if you will, in the Southwest, when the United States takes over, both after the Texas revolution, that's obviously not the U.S. but later on, and then with the Mexican American War, it's the military that's the first police body in the region. So it's an apt thing. But even at that time, there was this relational situation where, yeah, there was violence, yeah, there are people were treated as colonized people, but there are also Mexican Americans in law enforcement. There were people of Mexican origin in positions of authority. And there are ways in which they challenge that situation by fighting back, by becoming police officers, so on and so forth. That line of argument, if you will, follows through to Brown and Blue. But Brown and Blue is really more addressing the civil rights part of the story. And I'd say the biggest thing that I try to show in the book, the biggest argument, if you will, is that Mexican Americans engaged in a lot of conscientious and hard work with law enforcement to try to deal with the policing situation that they encountered across the Southwest. Police in some cases responded positively to the things that they wanted, but a lot of what they focused on was reform. They wanted to see they were not anti police. They did not want to see police go away. They wanted police to do a better job and they wanted to reform the situation that they were dealing with. So you have this litany, unfortunately, of incredibly violent things that happened. A hundred years. Sure. But closer to 200. If you put both of the books together and you might expect in that environment that people would just turn off the idea like this has never worked. Police has always been like this. Let's get rid of police. That was almost never the focus. That was almost never the idea. It was always about reform.
- [11:05]
B
Got it. Okay, cool. Yeah. Well, now, following up on that just a little bit more to kind of expand on the title itself, can you talk a little bit more about the setting of the book and in what ways the Southwest functions as an ideal location for a study of this topic in your book?
- [11:22]
C
Yeah. So I have a couple of reasons why the Southwest. A. As a Mexican American historian, that's where the vast majority of Mexican origin people live. And that's true back in the day. It's still largely true today. So geographically, it just makes sense if you're going to focus in on that population, that that's where you go. But I've also found both in the literature and oftentimes, you know, from my, from my colleagues and I would say to the broader public as well, that a lot of times there's just a. An ignorance of the Southwest. There's. There's a lack of knowledge. A lot of histories of policing are focusing on the. On the south or on the east coast, you know, less so on the Southwest. And the Southwest is this really like. It's a fascinating place. It's a really unique place. It's. It's different just about everywhere you go. So do you say Southwest, but Texas is not like Arizona. Arizona is not really like New Mexico. New Mexico is not like California. You know, they're all these places are different. And then when you throw in, like, parts of the Southwest that I think a lot of times we don't think about, you know, a Nevada or Colorado, for example, those places are different as well. And so, like, trying to put out there, if you will, more information about this region that I think is incredibly important and really interesting. But also understanding that when we're talking about policing and law enforcement, the Southwest history is really unique in a lot of ways, and especially where Mexican origin people are concerned. You could add to that the policing of indigenous communities or the policing of black people in the Southwest, and you get interesting stories there as well. I just wanted to focus that on the Mexican origin community because not that much work has been done. There have been some really important foundational studies that have been done. Not that much and you know, pulling that community into this region, like pulling those, those sort of threads of geographic and community oriented threads together, to me, just, you know, just felt like natural in a way.
- [13:28]
B
Right, right, right. Now I want to ask one more question sort of to, just to give us an overview of this before getting more into the meat of the book. And that question's about the archives. And I was really speaking of the Southwest as this region which encompasses this enormous amount of space and is also very different from one place to another. Can you talk a little bit about, just in a writerly sense, how did you pull together this vast amount of information? Why did you pick certain stories for certain chapters? Is it strictly a chronological decision or. Because I noticed in many of the chapters it goes from, there's sort of like this, here's some cases from Arizona, here's some cases from Texas, here's some cases from California. So can you just talk about a little bit more about that? And the reason I mentioned this is because when you look at the, the, the list of archives visited at the end of, of the book, it is impressive. So could you talk a little bit more about that?
- [14:28]
C
Thank you. I appreciate that compliment. I would again add that when you include the, the archives and Borders of Violence, some of the archives that I use there do not make it into brown and blue for, you know, for a number of different reasons. So it was a lot of on the ground work. It took a long time. My, my methodology, if you will, the way that I've already always approached research is leave no stone unturned. And, and of course there are always going to be stones that are unturned. You're always going to have situations where, you know, you miss something or you have to exclude something or whatever the, you know, whatever that kind of situation might be, but leave no stone unturned. And what that has done for me and part of the way in which I work is it's provided me really local level, ground level data points in some cases, really like granular bits of information that I can then piece together to either put those pieces into conversation with larger regional or even national things that are going on or, you know, sort of zoom out and explain why those little bits of information, those granular bits of data are like really important and why they matter and what they tell us. One of the things that I found going to these different archives that I didn't know until I got there was the, the, the connections that I would find between a Houston and a Phoenix and an Albuquerque and an La or even in smaller, you know, small towns, the connections that I would find between, you know, a small border community in, in Arizona and, you know, one in Texas or whatever, you know, police records, for example, jailhouse logs, arrest dockets, courtroom dockets. A lot of times these really, really giant books that are, you know, cataloging arrests and whatnot. And I think a lot of times, either people didn't, like, other researchers didn't find that these things interesting, or they didn't see the value. They didn't, you know, see the value of the data. Because a lot of times it's just a name and a charge and some other bits of information. But what I found was a. If you start to tabulate the names, you get some really interesting data points. If you start to tabulate how people are referenced or classified, you know, so even though Mexican origin people, many of the people under discussion in both of the books would be American citizens, in police records, they were identified as Mexican white people. White people would be identified as American. That was the only group that I got identified as American. Mexicans are listed as Mexicans. Black people are listed as Negro colored. You know, fill in the blank. And with Mexican origin people, a lot of times you would get this, we don't know who you are, so we'll just call you Mex. Like, the name is literally Mex or unknown Mechs. That's something that historically, like, goes from the 1830s up to the mid 20th century. And I found that erasure, for example, really interesting. You know, what does that tell us about how people are being thought of, considered, made visible? So that's like, every time I went to one of these archives where I was like, I don't know what I'm going to find. And Michael, I cannot tell you the number of times really, in all my publications in the Southwest, be it my first book on the civil rights movements in Texas or these books. How many times I went into a research library and said, I'm researching this topic. And the people said, well, you're not going to find that much here. There wasn't really anything that went on. And then like a month later, I'm concluding all of the research that I was, that I was doing there, I found it to be really beneficial to go, yeah, to the big university archives for sure, but to go to the public library or to go to whatever, like, even like small cultural center that might be available and see what they had and just found tons of information. I mean, enough information to write two books.
- [18:28]
B
Yeah, yeah, certainly. And it's really, again, you see so much of that, that research pay off in the writing and the stories that you tell, the stuff that you're able to get to, which I really appreciate. Well, let's dive a little bit more deeply into the arguments in the chapters that you are able to construct from that research. At the beginning of chapter two, you note that, and I'm quoting, Battling Police Abuse was at the forefront of the Chicano movement. So could you take us through a little bit of that history? That strikes me as an important contribution. Similar to recent books like Joshua Clark Davis. He had a book called Police against the Movement that came out just recently, which also explored the centrality of activism against police brutality in groups like CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So can you talk a little bit more about how your work contributes to how historians understand the Chitano movement, for example?
- [19:19]
C
Yeah, it's a really great question. It also. That question also kind of takes us slightly back to the question you asked previously, and that is kind of the organization of the book, because with Borders and Violence and justice, that was a really topically focused book. I originally wrote Brown and Bru Blind Brown and Blue is much more of a strict chronology. And actually found this is sort of the value, if you will, of doing, you know, of having. Having read. Read your book for the press before it goes anywhere, is the readers made suggestions that went me to say I need to reorganize things. And so that's why you see the organization in. In the way it is. And those two chapters, like, one is on police violence towards Chicano movement, civil rights movement participants. The other is towards non movement, like people who had no connection to the movement at all. But still that generated, you know, activism protests, where the Chicano movement would then come in to defend those people or support them or whatever. And so one of the things that I found in a lot of the history on Mexican American civil rights and on the Chicano movement is there will be moments where the police are there, like they're at a protest or there's violence or, you know, whatever. But then the story will move away to, you know, well, then there was the protest here or whatever. You know, the next sequence of events was. And I always had that, like, man, I really want to know more about what happened with the policing situation. And the more that I got into it, the more that I found. Wait a second. For a lot of these. For a lot of these groups in the late 1960s and even again, going back to what, you know, we might refer to as the non violent phase of the, of the Mexican American civil rights movement, dealing with policing problems was always at the forefront and indeed was the genesis or the reason for a lot of the civil rights groups that formed in that period. So probably the best example of that would be the Brown Berets in Los Angeles. They are a lot of times considered to be sort of like the Mexican American equivalent to the Black Panthers. A little bit different than that. But like their, a lot of their founding leadership were like, the first thing we went to deal with was police brutality. If you look at their like, you know, platform or the ten point program, like four of the ten points, 40% of the platform is focused on law enforcement or criminal justice issues. So like that's what that group was founded for. And then when that group spreads across the Southwest, that's what those other groups were doing. There's a chapter in Albuquerque, it's actually called the BlackBerry. They changed their name from Brown Berets to blackberries. They're, they're one of the few groups that actually has like an abolition, a police abolitionist perspective. They still work with law enforcement to, you know, to do reforms. But just the centrality of dealing with these policing issues to the Chicano movement, I, I found to be somewhat missing in the literature. And it was the thing that I really wanted to emphasize. And the reason why I think it's important is it in doing that I feel like I really gave, really put the Chicano movement in a new light. And the other thing is the chronology. A lot of times the Chicano movement and whatever book you're reading or article you're reading, it might, you know, it might end at 73 or 75. I found stuff going up into the 1980s that I'm like, this is all consistent activism going from the, from the 60s on up to the 80s. I think this movement actually lasted a lot longer than, than people might think, you know, so even just by focusing on police, I'm able to, I'm able to make the argument like this thing went on for a lot longer than we currently believe it did.
- [23:05]
B
Right? Yeah, I think that that's helpful to think through. Now. I had a question about how it suggests, I guess what you just described suggests how the focus in research into activist groups, even sympathetic research, has shifted in recent years. And I would say that the social movements of the last 10 or so years have kind of once again put the significance of the police and movements against the police into our vision in a way. And I was, I'm curious Just because my thought would be that historians are paying closer attention to policing now than they were perhaps 10 or 15 years ago. And so just as a, as a follow up to that, would you say that your own research has shifted in relation to that kind of stuff? So your first book, if you could, or your, so the question is like your, your dissertation, your first book, did they have the same focus or has your own focus shifted over time in response to these changing things?
- [24:06]
C
Yeah, it's a great question. And you know, I do want to acknowledge like, like the, the. There are people out there that are doing and have been doing really, really great work. You know, I'm thinking in particular Max Cantor is written on policing in the LA area, Brandon Jett and Justin Randolph, and they're doing policing in the South. Elizabeth Hinton is a really great example. A lot of really, really great work has been done. But yeah, I would say my own way of looking and thinking about things has evolved. One of the things that I've always tried to do in my research is basically put the communities that I'm, that I'm focusing on, like, put, put them first. They're the ones telling the story. They're the ones that have the focus or that, you know, the focus should be on. And so, you know, fighting their own battles was the title of my first book. In that book it was let me tell the story of these communities battling for civil rights. Let me tell the story of what they were actually doing and then try to bring them into conversation to see, like, where did black people and Mexican origin people, where did they work together? But more importantly, why did they not work together more? What was the cause, if you will, of disunity. That focus on putting those communities first has always been really part of my thinking on how to do this kind of work. But in brown and blue and borders of violence and justice, it's that. But also trying to like a. Just not tell an awful negative story that's nothing but a litany of violence, which in some ways I have to do like that, that there's like important trigger warnings in both books because there is so much violence, but also to just not make it like all negative. Like to try to show like, yeah, this awful thing happened and we need to understand that. But also out of this awful thing, because of the hard work and suffering that people endured, we got a, B or C, or if they got this particular change that they wanted, I think that's like a really important way to, you know, to try to tell the story right.
- [26:19]
B
Well, Maybe this next question that I have follows up on that a little bit. So on page 65, you suggest an argument linking together that chapter, which is chapter three, with the previous chapter as well as chapter four. And your argument is about how police violence wasn't, and I'm quoting some aberration, but was rather a standard part of police practice across the Southwest. So could you talk a bit more about how you came to that conclusion and the work that those chapters do in demonstrating it?
- [26:48]
C
Yeah, that's another really great question because it shows you, if you will, sort of the argument across both books and sort of how this is just these are not individual histories. Like this is one long history that just happened to come out in two different books. So there are ways you can see, like you can find an incident, what just whatever the incident might be, you can find an incident and be like, oh, that's really awful. But that's just an incident that happened in this, in this one place. And then maybe you find another incident in another place, you know, 7,700 miles away, let's say, you know, across a great distance and be like, well, that, that happened there too. But like, are those two things really connected? You know, are they the same? Like, where is the connection? What I found in doing this research is across the entire close to 200 year span, there are these examples and consistencies that really can't be ignored.
- [27:48]
B
Right.
- [27:48]
C
And you can't be like, oh, well, that happened there and it was a different group and a different police officer and a different situation. And so it's different. When you start to piece it all together, it is a multitude, a multiplicity of different examples going on across generations that to me showed this is not that thing that happened in that one place is not different or as I say in the book, an aberration. That's actually what's going on, that's actually what's been done. So there's one really good example I can give you that demarcates that. And that's a concept in the Southwest that's known as the Le de Fuga. Or Le de Fuga is literally the law of flight in Spanish. It is the police power. The police have to shoot people in the back as they're fleeing. Either, let's say it's a jailbreak or fleeing to see it on crime or whatever it might be. I have leifuga cases from the 1830s on, really on up to close to the present day. So we might think like, well, this idea, this sort of seems like A frontier justice kind of idea went away at some point. No, it, it continues and it's, and it still exists, you know, in some ways today. So that's no, that's no aberration that ended at the turn of the 20th century because police started to professionalize or whatever. It goes on for a long time.
- [29:10]
B
Right. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because there's a couple of these great concepts like the Le Fuga that you, that you bring out as these consistent practices over time. So maybe if you wouldn't mind, there's, there's a second one that I'm thinking of that's, that is really prominent and that is this thing that you call Papers Please Policing and that you even tie to SB 1070 in Arizona in more recent years. So if you wouldn't mind, could you talk a little bit about Papers Please Policing and those kinds of consistencies over time?
- [29:38]
C
Yeah, so there's, there are a lot of ways in which Papers Please Policing is just like an evolution of practice, you know, going back to the, to the 19th century, a practice of, you know, of surveillance and, you know, basically questioning people largely based on their, their identity. Like, you know, what are you doing here? What's, you know, the, the part of, part of that concept is there's always a suspicion of criminality. Right. There's a suspicion that something criminal has happened. Now, back in the 19th century, into the early 20th century, the quote unquote papers, like, they, they were different. They didn't really exist. Like, you know, you could cross the border, hop back and forth 50 times a day, didn't really matter. You could be a Mexican origin person and live your entire life in the United States as a citizen of Mexico without it being any kind of issue.
- [30:37]
B
Right.
- [30:39]
C
The actual quote unquote papers police policing is really a thing that, at least in my research, starts up in the 1960s. But it is exactly that. I mean, it's a type of racial profiling that says you look a certain way, one way. I can engage in a law enforcement practice with you whether you've done anything wrong or not. The justification I can have is I need to see your identification because I don't know if you're really supposed to be here. And one of the things that I found that was interesting in my research is a lot of times those paper police policing issues would be tied to other things. So I talk about this neighborhood renewal program in California, Bryant Van Alden neighborhood in California, that had this paper police element tied to it, because what they were Literally trying to do was force Latino residents out so that they could gentrify these communities. And there's the whole forcing out, that's one thing. But a lot of the ways which they did that and intimidated people was by doing papers. Police policing.
- [31:39]
B
Right, right, right, right. Okay. Well, thank you again. That's. That's. I'm glad we got to talk about the papers, please. Policing as well. Now, I wanted to move on to chapter five, which was probably my favorite of the chapters. And what I mean by that is that it's one that I'll probably remember the longest, but that'll also probably use to teach in the future, because I think it does a really great job of summarizing these early applications of the fourteenth Amendment by the Warren Court to get at a different type of, like, situation with policing, if you like, than in the past. So could you talk about that material that you cover there and your argument about how the struggles by Mexican Americans transformed not only the legal system, but also the experience of incarceration in the United States?
- [32:27]
C
Yeah, again, it's another great question, and I really appreciate the compliment. So I wanted just to go back really quickly to the thing I said a little while ago about the value of having people read your work. The press assigns readers. Right. I found out after the fact that one of my readers was Max Falker Cantor, who's a policing scholar, primarily writes about la, and then a carceral scholar named Rob Chase, who's also a really great scholar. Both are friends of mine, really, really good, good guys. And one of the things that happened with this book is that Max, he's a policing scholar, he was like, I think there's like too much jail, prison stuff in here. You know, you should maybe take it out. If the book is on policing. Rob, who's a Carcel scholar, was like, like, this jail and policing stuff's really great. I think you need to have more of that. And I was left with this, like, what do I do to satisfy either one of those. One of those readers? And what I ended up doing, I totally reorganized the book based on their comments and what ended up happening with that stuff. Like, it was spread out all over multiple chapters. And as I started pulling out, like, let me pull out the policing, excuse me, the jail and prison stuff, and see what I have. And before I knew it, there was 40 pages. That's a good, solid chapter. It was the same thing with the local level police reforms. Let me pull out this stuff that's all related to police reform. Well, here's a nice 45 page chapter. I can put those things into individual chapters to really focus in on Mexican origin people and dealing with incarceration. That's what chapter five that you referenced was about. And yeah, one of the arguments that I make is that Mexican origin people and the situations that they encounter generate a lot of important cases that really change the law and change how the Constitution is used for them, but also for all Americans. The Hernandez v. Texas case is one really good example where this guy, Pete Hernandez was tried for murder. It was an all white jury. He claimed, and his attorneys claimed that that was unfair, that Mexican origin people had been systematically excluded from the jury. This is at a time when Mexican origin people are classified as white. So it was a really. I remember this guy, George Sanchez, who was a University of Texas professor, really interesting historical figure in his own right. He talked about the argument in Hernandez case. He said it was a very ticklish argument. And what he meant by that is, how can you say we didn't have a jury of our peers when it's a jury of white people and we're saying we're white people. Right. And what the court says is a Mexican origin people are as a class. They have been systematically excluded from jury service. So it's oftentimes referred to as the class apart theory. There are white people, but they're a different class or different type of white people. But also that violates the 14th Amendment. You can't do that. Right. So that, that as far as jurisdiction, and there are other cases that follow, cases in the African American community and whatnot, that do a similar thing for me. I think what a lot of people have been drawn to is the Miranda case. I've had any number of people who are incredibly knowledgeable, well read scholars who were like, I had no idea Miranda had anything to do with Mexican American people. And like that case is really foundational in the Escovedo case before it. Really foundational to how law enforcement in a lot of ways works today. But you know, Miranda, Miranda was Ernesto Arturo Miranda. He was a guy from Mesa, Arizona. He had robbed and attempted to sexually assault a number of different women. He actually did rape a woman. He was, you know, he was tried for that in that particular situation. This woman, her name was Lois Jamieson, she was unable to identify him as her attacker in a lineup, but police still told Miranda she had identified him. And at that point he basically said, well, let me tell you about it. And you know, and said, what, what happened? And basically what, what happens when when his case goes to the Supreme Court is. It really is a, it's, it's a right to counsel case, but it's also a Fifth Amendment self incrimination case. Because what they argue is without counsel or without access to counsel, which is the same thing that the Escobeda case just a handful of years before had argued, without a right to counsel, people will say the wrong thing. And of course, what Miranda said was not only do people have a right to counsel, they have to be informed of their rights because other people, otherwise people might be ignorant of their rights, they might not understand their rights, and then they say or do the wrong thing. Right. And so that's where we get these Miranda warnings. You know, police, you know, have a right to remain silent and all that sort of stuff. Keep in mind there's language about access to an attorney in there as well. So that's, you know, again, going back to other constitutional rights. And to do that is to Mirandize somebody. So his name is now a verb ized form of that action. And the other thing that I thought was interesting, I know I've gone on about this, I think it's really fun. Maybe fun's not the right word. I think it's really interesting thought provoking. One of the things that I found is interesting is other countries have adopted the same thing, the same kind of language, and they actually call it a Miranda warning too. So it's now like this international thing where they're still using the name of this individual from Arizona of Mexican origin who started spawn this particular case.
- [38:14]
B
Right. And as you, as you suggest it, it goes to show how influential the struggles for those rights by Mexican American folks in the United States have been to securing them for everybody. In a way, I also appreciate the, the insight into the writing process that you gave because I know, I mean, that sounds like some serious reorganizing. And I know that, you know, you can get stuck in the forms of putting these chapters together and then to kind of like take them apart and reorganize things is a lot. That's, that's a, that's a serious task. But the book is also better for it. So I think that that's, that's.
- [38:46]
C
No, I mean, that's it exactly. I mean, I always kind of think of it as like a tapestry or a quilt. And like once you put it together, you don't want to unstitch and take it apart and reorganize things. But in a lot of ways it became a much nicer quilt Because I did that. Right. It actually makes, it makes a lot more sense. And I'm able to present the arguments I was trying to make in a much more, like, unified, I think, easy to access way, as opposed to having it sort of stretched out across the entire, you know, seven chapters in the book.
- [39:18]
B
Right, right, right, right. Great. So now we've been talking about national and even international implications to the policing of Mexican Americans in the Southwest.
- [39:28]
C
Eight chapters. All right, I'll make sure I get that right. Eight chapters, no worries.
- [39:32]
B
Right.
- [39:32]
C
All right, I interrupted you, Michael, Go ahead.
- [39:34]
B
No, that's fine. No, that's fine. I just want to take us to the other level, from the international and the national down to the local, because I think chapter six does a good job of demonstrating all of these different reforms, like police athletic leagues, but also much else that are taking place at this time. So could you talk about what those reforms looked like, what the different reforms were, how the Chicano movement was able to achieve them, and then also, I guess, the effects that they have on people at the local. Col. Yeah.
- [40:04]
C
Yeah. So just to go back real quick to chapter five, it looks at big incarceration issues. These big, basically, it's all about in custody stuff. What, what, what in criminal justice and law enforcement and criminology is called custodial situation.
- [40:19]
B
Right.
- [40:20]
C
But a lot of those custodial situations are like, on the ground, you know, people protesting, like, not a prison, but a police station or in, you know, in the cases of Dwight Duran and, and Eddie Sanchez and other people like that, actually, actually protesting and demanding changes to, you know, penitentiary system, like, you know, to actual prison. Right. Chapter six moves that to local people addressing policing as, as. And reform of policing as kind of like a local level issue. And yeah, there were a lot. There's a, there's one of the things I found that was just fascinated by is there was so much going on, so many different ideas being tried, some of which today we still have, and we don't really even. Like, I think sometimes people didn't even recognize, like, having officers learn some level of spoken Spanish in the Southwest makes sense. Right. That's still a thing that police officers are working on today. Like, like that comes out of reform efforts in the 60s and 70s or like, the idea they would have called it, you know, like, psychological or, you know, some other, like, testing kind of thing. But it's really like cultural sensitivity training today. Like, that has its genesis in the same period. Police athletic leagues, interestingly enough, go way. Like, I think they started in, like, 1917 in New York. So they go way, way back. What happens in the 60s is that local people, activists and law enforcement figure out that this is a way to bring the police and the community into conversation with each other and to ease tensions by having young people be trained and to do sports with local law enforcement as their coaches and mentors and whatnot. And the thing that I found that I thought was really interesting is I particularly focus on Albuquerque as the sort of the case study. Other communities are similar, but the thing that I found was like, a lot of these teams, they win championships and that sort of thing, which is kind of cool in its own right. But also people really appreciated and enjoyed it. It wasn't like, oh, police are forcing this thing on us. It was the thing that community wanted. It was a thing that activist groups outside of the Mexican American community wanted. And it was a thing that police were like, yeah, let's give that a try. Because the way things have been going, like, you know, maybe not so good. One of the other things that I found that I thought was interesting is the number of times communities were asking for more police. Like, we had these problems. This situation occurred. We need to actually have more police on the ground. You know, can you. What can we do about that? You know, so there's. There's just. I. I could go in any number of different directions. Just so much going on.
- [43:12]
B
That.
- [43:12]
C
That actually was initially one of the longest chapters. It was like 65 pages or something like that. And that's just. That's a totally unmanageable chapter in any kind of book. So I really had to, you know, like, whittle it down. But I think that the Cutting Room Floor is probably another, like, good article that I could, you know, that I could craft together. There's so much going on.
- [43:32]
B
Sure, sure. No, I think, yeah, I think that's. That's a lesson that I had to learn painfully as well. My. I turned in like another chapter that was 80 pages long in the Word document. And one of my reviewers, it was another one of those moments when it became better because of it. But one of my reviewers, I think both of them actually said that that was much too long. My solution was not to cut it, but to split it into two. And then I ended up getting what ends up being like a nice, like three part structure with three chapters each. And those that chapter gets split into the last two chapters. That worked out very well for me as well. But I didn't do the kind of. I mean, there's certain heavy Lifting that. That you're. That you did with the previous reorganization. That I'm not sure I could be accused of with doing that.
- [44:15]
C
Well, I mean, it is the case. Like, let's be honest, like, Michael, sometimes those readers reports can be really like, the work. They can be painful sometimes, and the work that they want us to do can be really, really hard and painful. In this particular case, it was like. I don't know that I necessarily wanted to do it, but it was the. All right, look, let me sit down and do this work, because I think these guys are right, and it's going to make a much better book.
- [44:43]
B
Yeah, it's sort of an exercise in humility to decide that you're not wedded. To be willing to make the changes. To make it probably better is you just have to accept it. And I think that's hard sometimes.
- [44:57]
C
Yeah, no, it's rewarding in that way.
- [44:59]
B
Right, right, right, right. Well, another thing I appreciated about your book was your attempt to move the history of policing and activism against it past the 1970s into the 80s and 90s. I'm interested in that as well. So I thought that this was a very welcome addition. So could you talk a little bit about those struggles against police abuse that Chicano activists engaged in in that time?
- [45:23]
C
Yeah, so the. This is another one of those areas where I did, like, there's.
- [45:28]
B
That.
- [45:29]
C
There's a part of me, Michael, that as a. Primarily a mid 20th century historian, like a. Going back to the 1830s, felt really unusual, felt really odd. Actually felt really good because it felt like I was getting into an area where I really had growth to like, I needed to. There's a learning curve there. And as an academic, I appreciate that, but I also have, like, b. That sense that history stops somewhere.
- [45:53]
A
Right.
- [45:53]
C
And I'm pretty much a kid of the 80s, so to think about the 80s as history, that in and of itself was kind of a. I had to overcome that. Like. Well, that's. That's current events, right? No, those current events, you know, were quite some time ago now. And.
- [46:07]
A
And.
- [46:07]
C
And it ended up being really, really fruitful because it's another one of these examples where I didn't know, like, I'm not an LGBT historian. I'm not a historian of sexuality in any way. And yeah, I'm finding these cases in the 80s where, in particular, in response to the AIDS crisis, local communities are tasking law enforcement with dealing with that, you know, and that felt really consistent to me as well, because of the way in which oftentimes police are used in mental health crisis situations. Right. And so I was able to extrapolate from that and make this argument that, like a lot of times, police are used in ways that they probably shouldn't be. This is not to say that there aren't a number of good police officers who are approaching a mental health crisis. They've done their training, They've learned a lot. They do really good work. But I think we have so many examples where in a mental health crisis, police act like police and they end up killing somebody who just really needs somebody to talk to or needed some kind of hospitalization or whatever. The same thing happened in the AIDS crisis. Local communities were like, we understand this is a medical issue, but they were also influenced by the bias at the time, in particular against gay men and the idea that this was like the quote, unquote, gay plague. I'm sure for any of us that grew up in that area, we can remember how scary aids was. But the way a lot of city governments chose to deal with it wasn't like, yeah, there are parts of it that dealt with that as a medical issue. But also they had seen a lot of budget cuts to, like, social services and whatnot. It's always. It seems always easy for local communities to say, hey, it's acceptable to cut this, but we still need that work to be done, so let's shunk that to law enforcement. And so the policing of gay men became a policing issue. And what ends up happening? There are a number of cases of gay men dying at the hands of police at really horrible situations that then spawn civil rights activism that is A, connected to the Chicano movement and b, connected to the gay rights movement. And I just thought that stuff was really, really interesting. There's also this case in San Antonio of this guy, Hector Santos, boy, who's killed by this police officer, Comac is his last name. He had been involved in a killing of an African American man back in the 1960s, and this was in San Antonio. And so when he kills this, this individual, Hector Sanchez Goy, who's a Mexican national, under question of the circumstances, the community is like, oh, my God, we remember this coma guy. Like, what is the deal? And like, their protest. Yes, but like, involvement with the Mexican government, that's also a thing that consistently runs through both books. The presence of the Mexican government trying to act, you know, act on behalf of both its citizens and also Mexican American people. And like, that case really becomes this, you know, this international incident. Right. So the 1980s to me, were really, really, it was a really, really fruitful chapter and a thing to focus on. And obviously it segues into the 90s, which then takes us up to the present day in the, in the final chapter and to me, really the 90s and the Clinton crime law, where everything kind of all falls part. Like up until that point, yeah, we had lots of problems, but we also had communities that are willing to engage in, like both the Mexican American people asking for reform, but law enforcement also engaging in reform. After the Clinton crime bill. I mean, it, it caps off a series of really on a really sort of ugly, increasing hyper militarism amongst police. And really, if you think about like where we are today, that, that's the 19, that starts in the 1990s. It doesn't go back to the 60s. It doesn't go back to the 1800s. It goes back to basically 1994.
- [50:10]
B
Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, you, I thought that that was a helpful part of the book is that you're, again, you're moving forward into these, you're kind of break. Breaking through this idea. Sometimes when I notice it's like for historians of the 20th century, the 1970s is the end and there's been a hesitancy. I don't know if it's a generational thing or what, but I was excited to see you move into that. So you're concluding in two interesting ways. In one, you're willing to kind of go into the present and draw those types of conclusions. But the other one is that you make some policy interventions and you end the book with a lengthy list of proposals about what works and what doesn't in police reform. So, so what do you think activists, policymakers and others can learn from the history you tell? What do you want folks to take away from this?
- [50:57]
C
Yeah, again, it's another great question. I really appreciate it. You know, part of the problem I think that we have getting into more contemporary times as historians is there is, I think, always the fear or the potential of what might be construed as some kind of political bias, you know, on the part of, of us as academics. And I think a lot of times we shy away from that. But I wanted to tell that story, you know, those stories from the early 20th century, 21st century, because they, they obviously have relevance and, and matter and in some cases, you know, the, the circumstances actually lead in some, some interesting directions. But as far as that, you're, you're referencing specifically the code at the end of the. I wanted to write that a, in part because of what I just Said like sometimes we just, I think as historians we think we're great at talking about the past. We're not really good at the present or prognosticating about the future. And I wanted to not do that. But b, throughout my time doing both of these books and like presenting at conferences and whatnot, I would get people saying like, like, okay, you, you told, you told these stories and that's great, but what do we, like, what do we do about that today? And I didn't want to, like, that's the b. Right. I didn't want to leave that part hanging. Just tell the story, here's the past and it's done. And there's no inferences to draw from today. And so that's why I wrote that coda. Part of it is speaking to the public, part of it is speaking to other academics. Because I think there are people out there, cultural scholars, mal policing scholars, who probably would look at my reform arguments and be like, reform doesn't work. It never has worked. It always leads to something else or it gets eroded over time or whatever. And part of what I wanted to say is you're right in a way. Some of these scholars would say you can't reform an institutionally racist system. There's a lot of ways in which that's true. But also I have a number of examples where reforms do work. Work, right? So let's not, if you will, throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let's look at, you know, things from a variety of different angles and, and sides. The other thing that I wanted to do was provide like a list of things that we think work and really don't, but also things that we could do that might be helpful. So the example of the things that, I mean, we think work but they really don't work very well would be things like, you know, patrol car dash cams and police body worn cameras and whatnot. The whole problem with that kind of technology, it's a use of technology to try to either augment public trust in the police or to try to protect police if they should happen to be accused of doing something wrong. Technology can't build trust. And how many times have we seen, I mean, even most recently with the situation in Minneapolis where different people are having different interpretations of what they are seeing, or there are examples where what we're actually seeing doesn't, like we don't understand, it doesn't show us a clear picture. We have these situations where an instance of violence happen and people say, what is the body camera going to show what is the dash cam going to show? And then it doesn't show us anything. It tells us a conflicting story. So we think this technology is going to do this stuff for us. It really isn't. As far as big picture issues, a lot of these have been discussed by other scholars. Some of them, unfortunately, I think are probably unrealistic, especially in today's climate. So one of the things that I say is that both the war on drugs and the war on crime are A rooted in, rooted in racism and B, have never worked and they don't seem likely to ever work and they've caused incredible harm. So one of the things that we could do to deal with this problematic aspect of law enforcement is get rid of the war on crimes and war on drugs. I'm doubtful in the current political climate that that would ever happen. Well, one of the other things that I say is we should maybe think about revising certain police training practices to move away from what is oftentimes referred to as the warrior mentality and more towards the guardian mentality and to teach police that the public isn't the enemy. That's a lot of times what goes on in that warrior model is that the public is the enemy. Police have to always be scared or hyper vigilant with the public and you know, war on crimes, warrants. We're not at war. If we're at war, that means the police are at war against us as the public. And I think there are probably ways in which people might say, but yeah, Brian, we are. They are. At least it seems that way. But you know, really we're not. Because if we are, they're going to win. They have all the guns and all the power and all the manpower and, and they're going to win. So let's try to teach the police that we're not the enemy. We're not to be, you know, you don't have to be afraid of us. And in fact, what a lot of times we need what most calls to police are force for out. Like they're not that police don't people think police are fighting crime and they, you know, prevent crime and that. No, police don't do that, but they do get a lot of calls to help people. Right? So maybe we can work on that. Like we need you to help us not see us as the enemy. Maybe we can work on something like that.
- [56:19]
B
Well, Brian, it's been a pleasure doing history with you.
- [56:21]
C
Oh, thank you, Michael. I appreciate it.
- [56:24]
B
For our listeners, Brian Behinkin's book, Brown and Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement and Civil Rights in The Southwest from 1935 to 2025 is available now from the University North Carolina Press, and you can find it wherever fine books are sold. Brian, I thank you again for being on the show today, and congratulations on the book.
- [56:42]
C
Thank you again, Michael. I really appreciate it.